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Orwell and the new world order.

Facts are irrelevant in history. The only thing that matters is what you can convince the people to believe. If you can convince the world the Tet Offensive was a victory for the Viet Kong then that will be the truth. It will become the truth. It will be the truth. It doesn’t matter that the Tet Offensive practically wiped out the Viet Kong all facts that don’t fit your world view or political ideology can get flushed down the memory hole and you have won. It doesn’t mater that the Crusades were a belated attempt to regain territory from the Moslem armies who had conquered them and drove out the original mostly Christian or Jewish inhabitants. All that matters is what you can get people to believe.

Orwell was a prophet. He just missed the year but his words should be a warning engraved on the minds of men for eternity.

Orwell spoke of the totalitarian systems of Communism and Nazism. He agreed with neither while he did consider himself a English Socialist much of his writing can be used for an argument against much of Socialism and Progressive ideology.

Take this quote from Orwell on guns:

“THAT RIFLE HANGING ON THE WALL OF THE WORKING-CLASS FLAT OR LABOURER’S COTTAGE, IS THE SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY. IT IS OUR JOB TO SEE THAT IT STAYS THERE.”

The people who call themselves “Progressives” don’t want you to know that their political ideology is Socialism. That’s why they say Progressive rather then Socialist. Orwell warned about how people twist language so politicians can get people to believe one thing but they really mean something else. The Progressives just won’t tell you that’s what they really want is to disarm you so they use terms like “Gun Control”. It sounds nice making laws against the use of arms however a criminal does not care about the law. All you really have is laws that only affect law abiding peoples and not the criminal. Yes Background checks are a good thing because it keeps known criminals from getting a gun at a legal store. However the criminal will still try to get one on the black market and there is nothing we can really do about that. What they really want to do is disarm the whole of the law abiding populace. With arms even Orwell the man who claimed to be a Socialist knew that it was the duty of society to make sure that the people who he fought for had the ability to defend themselves from criminals and especially from the totalitarian dictatorships that he wrote of.

Orwell was a Prophet. People misquote him and claim to know what he said but don’t. Like Nitsche they will misquote him for eternity. They take a line or two and run with it without the lines that follow and makes the true point.

Case in point from Nitsche:

“God is dead.”

OK but what was the rest?

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Or this quote:

“What are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’

While he was chastising religion or more to the point those who only used the morals and teaching of religion when it was to their advantage, he was lamenting the lose of the religious morals in the idea of a world without the religious morals. That is why he wrote the second line “And we have killed him”. It was to the hypocrites that he spoke that. He was lamenting the lose of morals and the hypocritical use of Gods teachings only when it was advantageous. At the time he was also trying to come to terms with a world without the religious standard of morality and how to make a new morality without god but was just as moral so that we would not lose the good things that came from religion while being able to move past the necessity of God for our morality. He needed the morality but was trying to find a way to have it without having to have if come from a god. He might have been an Atheist but he understood the importance of morality of the Christian God and wanted to be able to justify himself and morality without the need for God.

But people take the “God is dead” statement and take it wrong. He didn’t believe in the Christian God but he wanted to believe in the morality of the teachings and wanted to find a way to take both together.

It’s like Orwell. He wanted to refute the time he was in. Orwell spoke out against Totalitarianism and Monarchism. He spoke of the working man and Socialism but it wasn’t what we think of now. To him living in Europe he saw the difference between the working class and the aristocracy and he fought for the working class. But in America we don’t have an aristocracy or a real one anyway. We have let some families fake like they are like the Kennedys, but thats only because some people let them and there is a difference. Should we let them? No but sadly we do. However in America we never had the kind of class stratification you had in Europe. In Europe the “Rich” where always going to be rich and the poor, poor. In America the poor could always make it rich all they had to do was work at it and it was going to happen just think of Andrew Carnegie a poor immigrant who turned himself into what at the time was the second richest man in history. The man who would never give you a dollar but would build you a library so you could learn to do it yourself. In America it could happen. I say it could happen because it did. You started work at 15 in some low paying crap job but at 40 your where a millionaire. The American Dream was always possible. Orwell claimed to be a Socialist but often spoke and wrote like a Libertarian or a Classical Liberal. The man wrote the book “Animal Farm” as a warning against his own ideology. He was speaking to the Europe of his day but not to America.

Orwell understood that the people who could control language and what you could say could control the truth or at least control the truth of history that you believed. It didn’t matter if it was true all that mattered is making you believe it was.

If Orwell was alive now he would have seen and yelled against the socialism that runs rampant in our society and how it works in today’s politics. He would be a libertarian because he was the person who looked and watched the world and understood the times. Now the socialism that seemed so nice at the beginning of the 20th century to him would look like the failure it is in the 21st.

Granted I can’t speak for a dead man but that is is my idea on how he would think today. I would however give anything if I could talk to him now and see what he would really say about today’s world.
NOTE: For anyone who noticed the similarities between the first paragraph of this article and a comment I made here I just want you to know that that I felt I needed to say more so I used that as the starting point. I’ll probaly have more to say later after the Saki wears off…

Good post. Don’t know a lot about Orwell, didn’t know he was a socialist, granted not in the sense of socialists today.

I like that quote about the rifle on the working-man’s wall, that is always the first thing to go when a socialist gets into power, because for the people to resist they need two things, the will to resist and the means.

If that rifle is taken, the means to resist are gone, only the will remains to be broken and that ain’t too hard to break when people are already drunk on socialism.